Recordings from three UCSD composers

During 2010-11, the Union-Tribune profiled UCSD’s composition faculty, the heart of the university’s highly regarded music department. The entire series can be found online. For a photo gallery of the composers, visit uniontrib.com/ucsd-composers. For the stories, visit classical-music.uniontrib.com or the links listed below:

It’s a rare occasion when works by the members of UCSD’s esteemed composition faculty are performed in San Diego, especially off campus. Their uncompromising music can be challenging and demands a listener who is looking for more than nostalgia or escape. Like many contemporary artists, they require your engagement. Here are three recordings released by faculty composers in 2011 that are both provocative and accessible. You probably won’t be humming any of the tunes after listening to these pieces, but you may not be able to get the music out of your head.

For those present when composer Roger Reynolds staged his 75-minute masterwork, “Sanctuary,” at the Salk Institute in 2008, that memory is not likely to fade anytime soon. Reynolds is a composer who has never viewed music as something existing in a single dimension. At the Salk was a multidimensional, transformative, experience in which his percussive music engaged with theater, architecture, landscape and audience.

Every gesture from Steven Schick and the members of red fish blue fish had both musical and dramatic implications. And despite the considerable degree of technology involved (the computer, using sound generated by the musicians, sometimes commented upon, sometimes accompanied, the percussionists), it was the profoundly human nature of the work that stayed with you long after the music faded and the sound of the Pacific in the distance reasserted itself.

Reynolds’ DVD offers excerpts of the Salk performance, the entire 2008 premiere of the work at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., an interview with the composer, and most importantly, a studio recording made at UCSD’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), where Reynolds was composer-in-residence.

Just as the piece adapted itself, and was adapted, to the vastly different spaces of the National Gallery and the Salk, Reynolds and Ross Karre (also a percussionist) adapted the work to the medium of digital video. Using a process they call “Integrated Perspectives,” in which the cameras’ perspectives are choreographed to the music (in a sense, the cameras become another instrument in the ensemble), they have achieved a result just as stunning as the Salk performance itself.

The video allows plenty of space for the work’s expansive character, but it also has an intimacy that underscores the piece’s most humanistic, even optimistic qualities. Given that the computer is the unseen performer — generating sounds Reynolds has referred to as akin to dreaming — Karre has made its part visible. He creates a visual analogue for the computer portions that at first may seem distracting, but only if you mistake the video for performance documentation. This is not a document of a performance; it is the performance, a performance that will allow you to find your own “Sanctuary.”

Every composer needs an advocate, a performer whose expertise, passion and commitment breathes life into the notes written on the page. In violist Susan Ung (who is also his wife), Chinary Ung has found such a champion. Her interpretation of “Spiral XI: Mother and Child,” is spellbinding and she is also at the center of an inspired rendering of his chamber work, “Spiral IX: Maha Sathukar.”

You need special skills to perform Ung’s work. Not only does he make uncommon instrumental demands, but influenced by non-Western music, particularly the music of his native Cambodia, he requires that his instrumentalists also sing (and his singers play). Then there’s the whistling, the shouting, the texts taken from Pali, Sanskrit and Khmer.

Susan Ung makes it sound effortless. In what is essentially a duet with herself, she creates an atmosphere conducive to entering Ung’s evocative sound world. That world is highly influenced by his own background but seems to form a bridge between an ancient consciousness and our own. “Spiral IX” is a more extended journey, full of twists and turns and constant surprises as it occupies a space that seems at once of this world and beyond it. Maybe it’s the unconscious; or the universe; or both.

Hearing this album, its understandable why Liang won the Rome Prize earlier this year. He brings an astonishing range of influences and techniques to bear on a highly individual but always arresting compositional style. His pieces may be inspired by a dream of the Emperor Yang (“Milou”), calligraphy (“Winged Creatures”) or painting (Harp Concerto), but they all gently invite you into an intriguing, endlessly fascinating place where you won’t just encounter Liang — you’ll find out something about yourself as well.